Hillsborough tragedy sparks Danny Rhodes' novel Fan 25 years on

AS a teenager Danny Rhodes lived for Nottingham Forest. Nothing else mattered except standing at the Trent End with his mates and travelling the length and breadth of the country for away games. But all that changed on April 15, 1989 at Hillsborough when 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in the FA Cup semi-final against Forest.

Twenty five years on, Danny recalls that tragic day in a compelling semi-autobiographical novel, Fan, about teenager John Finch, whose adult life is haunted by the horrors he witnessed.

Danny, who was 17 at the time, saw faces pressed against the wire mesh and bodies laid out in rows along the touchline.

He says: “We witnessed the game begin and the events unfold slowly in front of our eyes.

“We witnessed people injured but then you start to see some aren’t injured... it’s worse than that. There are certain things that stick in my mind about that as I’m sure they do with all the people who were stood in there with us.

“For the first hour, no one knew what was going on and looking back at it now it sounds utterly preposterous but we still didn’t know if the game was going to be played.”

Fan is 42-year-old Danny’s third novel. Gritty and disturbing, it was a painful and difficult story to write on a personal and wider level.

“It created a lot of anxiety because you’re writing about real things and real events and I have been nervous about the response to it.

“If you’re going to tell a story like this, you’ve got to tell it as it was. You can’t hide behind a veil – to give a real sense of what the horror was, you have to deliver it that way.”

Danny, who grew up on a tough estate in Grantham and works as an English teacher in a secondary school in Canterbury, emphasises that he doesn’t want to come across as a victim.

“At the end of the day we stood and watched it happen – we weren’t in the other end and we certainly weren’t in danger.... although there’s other games on other days where I look back now and think it could have easily happened.”

His thoughts remain with the families who lost loved ones that day. “I feel their pain, I feel their suffering – I can’t believe it’s 25 years and it hasn’t been resolved.

“Everybody needs closure on it including the thousands of people like myself – and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write the book to give a voice to people that maybe weren’t in Leppings Lane but were still there.

“The thing I try to explain to younger people today is the FA Cup in 1989 was the biggest competition. It was huge – not like this half-baked thing it is today. It was the absolute pinnacle. Clough was desperate to win it and we were desperate to witness that. Everything in the season built up to it and at that very moment you’re supposed to be witnessing this spectacle, this other thing happens. This lurch in emotion between the event you’re expecting to see and the reality was massive.”

Coming from a practical background “where you just get on with things” it wasn’t until he started researching the symptoms of post traumatic stress for the novel, that Danny recognised one or two familiar traits in himself.

“I have moments where my mind races and I lose a period of time to nothing, like stepping out of yourself.

“I guess it’s hard to know whether any of it is triggered or whether it’s in you anyway. This might be normal... if I go out I have this anxiety issue where I have to have the house perfect before I leave it... it’s as if you’re never going to come back to it. I have a very morbid fascination with sudden death, the notion that it can happen at any second.”

Despite widespread debate about the tragedy, he could never have a conversation with anyone about his personal experience.

“That’s one of the things I try and get across in the book.

“I remember being in a pub garden with a load of football lads and they were talking about it. I mentioned that I was there and they didn’t want to talk about it any more. It’s very strange.

“They probably think that you, as a witness to it, are sensitive to it or they don’t want to say anything out of place. Weirdly it’s like when you talk to someone and they tell you they’re ill and you really don’t know what to say.”

The father-of-two stopped going to the game the season following the disaster.

Today he occasionally watches Charlton play but he’s fallen out of love with football. The collective spirit there was in the 80s is long gone, he feels.

“Football has changed a lot for the worse in my opinion. It’s not the game we used to go and see in the 80s.

“It’s ruled by money now. The stadiums were grim in the 80s but that made it a working man’s game – I don’t think it is anymore. It was much rawer and a more dangerous experience in the 80s and that’s what lured me to it. It was an escape.”

* Fan is available from book shops and online priced £11.99. A percentage of the profits will be donated to Anfield Sports and Community Centre in memory of the Hillsborough 96.